Anonymous attacks North Korean sites again

A weekend attack on North Korean websites staged by members of the Anonymous hacker group appears to have caused some problems for the sites.

Connections to several major Pyongyang-based sites, including the Korean Central News Agency and Voice of Korea, were slow although successful in several tests done in the first few hours of the coordinated attack, which began at 1am GMT on Sunday.

Those results are in contrast to a previous series of attacks that took the sites offline for days. That difference was acknowledged by an Anonymous Korea Twitter message:

North Korea has reconfigured its Internet connection since the last round of major attacks. Previously its Internet servers were connected to the rest of the Internet via only two links: a link to China Unicom and a back-up satellite connection. Now a third link, to China Unicom Hong Kong, has been added.

It’s not clear if the difference in effectiveness this time around was due to the smaller scale of the attack or the new connection.

Since before this weekend’s attacks, Anonymous hackers have been promising a large campaign against North Korean sites on June 25, which is the anniversary of the start of the Korean War.

No comments yet.

North Korea’s Internet connection with the world has returned to service after a nine and a half hour outage that followed hours of patchy performance. The cause of the outage is unknown, although several experts think it was probably due to an external distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This involves flooding web servers and other…

The South Korean government says it suspects hackers in North Korea were behind a series of cyber attacks last month. The attacks took place on June 25, the anniversary of the beginning of the Korean war, and continued for several days. When they began, several South Korean government and private-run websites were defaced or taken…

Tuesday’s series of denial of service attacks on major North Korean websites caused delays and frustration for legitimate users but doesn’t appear to have been as large or successful as the first round of attacks in late March and early April this year. Analysis by NorthKoreaTech.org of data related to the attacks shows the so-called…

The previously announced June 25 attack on North Korean websites by hackers working under the “Anonymous” name took an unexpected turn on Tuesday when several South Korean sites were hit with attacks. The actions coincided with the release of what hackers said were stolen files on American military personnel. The North Korean attack did start…

Members of the international hacking collective Anonymous look set to launch a planned cyber attack on North Korean Internet properties at midnight local Korean time on Monday night. The group has also promised to make public some details of documents gained from a claimed attack on North Korean internal servers. In messages posted to Twitter…

The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) has attacked claims by international hacker collective Anonymous that it managed to steal North Korean military secrets from computer servers. The attack came in a commentary on Friday, just days before Anonymous plans to launch a cyber-attack on North Korean websites. Earlier this week, a Twitter user claiming to…

A Twitter user claiming to speak on behalf of the Anonymous hacker collective says members of the group have succeeded in breaking into North Korean computer servers and stealing military documents. “Previously we said we would penetrate the intranet and private networks of North Korea. And we were successful,” the group wrote in a news release…

Members of the Anonymous hacking group say they are planning to re-launch attacks on North Korean websites from Sunday. [Updated. See below.] In messages posted to Twitter, several Anonymous members said the “#OpNorthKorea” attacks would resume on May 12 from 1am GMT, that’s 10am in the morning Pyongyang time. OpNorthKorea first began in late March, shortly…

An unidentified Internet user posting under the name of the Anonymous hacking collective has published a “hit list” of North Korean websites. The list is said to be related to a coordinated attack that hackers appear to be planning for June 25. The action is part of “OpNorthKorea,” which previously took sites in North Korea…

Choson Sinbo (조선신보, 朝鮮新報), the newspaper of the DPRK-affiliated Korean community in Japan, has apologized to its readers after its user database was leaked over the weekend by hackers. The Tokyo-based newspaper ran an apology on its website in both Korean and Japanese in which it acknowledged the Saturday attack resulted in the disclosure of private information about registered…